India’s Powerplay: The Tide Is Turning In The Indo-pacific
The Indian Navy on Wednesday commissioned its new base INS Jatayu at Minicoy Island of Lakshadweep to bolster its operational capabilities in the strategically important Indian Ocean Region (IOR). The naval base will also enhance operational reach, and support the Indian Navy’s efforts in anti-piracy and anti-narcotics operations in the Western Arabian Sea, New Delhi stated.
The base will provide New Delhi with significant geopolitical leverage to counter any perceived Chinese aggression along the disputed Line of Actual Control (LAC), while significantly extending the power projection capabilities of Indian naval forces, allowing them to ensure greater maritime security and connectivity within the IOR.
The development of an Indian naval base at the entrance is the ultimate sword of Damocles for Beijing’s economy. While the island sits a mere hundred miles away from the Malacca Strait, any Chinese response to a crisis in the area would be at least 1,500 miles away from Sanya, the nearest naval base.
Apart from levelling the geostrategic scales in India’s favor, a base at the Great Nicobar combined with the information exchange agreements as part of the Quad framework, puts India squarely in a position to exercise total maritime information dominance over the region.
Such a move also shores up India’s maritime warfighting capabilities by greatly enhancing its anti-access area denial (A2/AD) systems, which advanced regional powers such as Russia and China routinely deploy to counter their American rivals.
Coupled with India’s ambitious submarine modernization and expansion program, the geopolitical implications of these are far-reaching. In the coming years, Beijing would effectively be forced to consider New Delhi as an equal in its future dealings, lest it invite one of its few major vulnerabilities to become China’s Waterloo.
The commissioning of the new base comes against the backdrop of another strategic plan to modernize the Great Nicobar Island of the Andaman and Nicobar Island chain. A total of 720 billion rupees ($8.68 billion) has been approved for the project, which will also include the development of a “greenfield city.” This has colossal and far-reaching geopolitical implications for the region.
Maritime dominance
The emerging era of multipolarity is both a boon and a bane for India. On one hand, it perfectly complements New Delhi’s foreign policy, where multilateral engagement is considered one of the foundational pillars.
On the other hand, the emergence of new poles and the rise of China in the Indo-Pacific means a greater number of actors for India to strategically balance with. Complicating matters is the gradual crumbling of the US-led international order at a time when the rules for the new emerging order have not yet been established.
During such times of uncertainty and disruption, New Delhi has aptly chosen to bolster its naval presence in the IOR, which will undoubtedly have great geostrategic consequences for the region.
Beijing’s rapid rise in the international sphere has been followed by an equally rapid modernization of its naval forces, namely the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), which since the 1990s has transformed from being a restricted brown-water naval force to a full-fledged blue-water navy. Current US Congressional estimates consider the PLAN to be the largest naval force on the planet, in terms of the total number of combat vessels.
This rise of the PLAN has also coincided with the increasingly assertive Chinese foreign policy, especially in the South China Sea, which Beijing considers to be its own backyard.
The American naval presence in the region, therefore, is seen by the Chinese leadership as intruding within its sphere of influence. Beijing has been quite aggressive in its quest to regain control of the South China Sea – to the chagrin of smaller states such as the Philippines and Vietnam, which also lay claim to some of the disputed islands in the region.
The United States, on the other hand, claims it is undertaking ‘freedom of navigation’ exercises to counter what it sees as a Chinese challenge to the American-led international order. However, Washington is in a sensitive position since it is the sole major non-signatory to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) yet ironically claims to defend it.
The struggling American dominance leaves its allies in the Indo-Pacific anxious. Questions are raised, too, on how long the US can sustain maritime dominance within the region.
China, at the same time, is still unable to resolve its Malacca Dilemma, i.e., safeguard its commercial maritime routes through which around 65% of its total energy need is shipped. In the event of a conflict, any disruption or blockade by a rival fleet of the Strait could effectively cripple the Chinese economy with disastrous results.
Therefore, partly driven by Chinese efforts to address the Malacca question and partly to offset American regional superiority, the PLAN incursions have expanded into the IOR, an area that India sees as its backyard.
These Chinese forays have acquired a semipermanent presence within the region. New Delhi considers these unwanted incursions as a threat and part of Beijing’s larger String of Pearls theory aimed at encircling and isolating India through a series of strategically placed bases around it.
Since New Delhi can’t compete with the PLAN in attaining comparative conventional superiority, it is exploring other innovative means to deter the Chinese threat – and the new base in Lakshadweep is a significant move. The current assertive posture of India within the IOR should induce a strategic change towards transforming New Delhi from a land-based to a dual-based power, with formidable capabilities in both land warfare as well as the maritime battlespace. Only with a strategic shift towards making India a naval power will it be able to establish itself as a future world power backed by a full-fledged blue-water navy.
